Samuël Coghe – The Making and Unmaking of a Colonial Cattle Frontier. Capitalism, Science and Empire in Madagascar, 1870s-1970s

Vortrag The Making and Unmaking of a Colonial Cattle Frontier. Capitalism, Science and Empire in Madagascar, 1870s-1970s Samuël Coghe (FU Berlin) Abstract: In this presentation, I will explore the transformation of livestock production, pastoralist societies, imperial economies and animal landscapes in colonial and postcolonial Africa through the example of late nineteenth and twentieth-century Madagascar. I will draw on the concept of commodity frontiers, defined as moving sites of capitalist commodity production and extraction, to analyse the complex interplay between global capitalism, science and empire in the making and unmaking of the cattle frontier in Madagascar. I argue that the making of this cattle frontier implied a broad range of interventions, from the improvement of local breeds and new methods of cattle disease management to the sedentarisation of cattle pastoralists and the establishment of meat factories and new cattle trading networks. These attempts at transforming pre-existing cattle economies into profitable imperial and global commodities were not always successful, yet they wielded important social, economic and ecological consequences. Samuël Coghe is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Freie Universität Berlin and will take up a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Ghent University from January 2023. He received his PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence (2014) and has been Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the University of Giessen and Visiting Professor and Interim Chair of African History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has worked on the abolition of Atlantic slavery and the history of medicine, demography and anthropology in Central Africa, notably Angola. His current research project deals with the history of cattle and capitalism in the French colonial Empire. His latest publications include Population Politics in the Tropics. Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola, CUP 2022 and ‘A New Pastoral Frontier: Colonial Development, Environmental Knowledge, and the Introduction of Trypanotolerant Cattle in French Equatorial Africa, 1945-1960’, Environmental History 27.4 (2022) (forthcoming).